Melencolia in India?
Once you start looking, it’s easy to see (or think that you see) Melencolia squares in many old drawings.
Suzanne Ellison sent me this 1863 ink drawing of a Sikh carpenter that is in the collection of the University of California. Look at the guy’s feet. One is next to a marking gauge. The other is next to an odd angular thing.
As there is no try square shown in the illustration, it’s plausible that the thing touching the carpenter’s big toe is a simple square with a shaped blade.
— Christopher Schwarz
Hardware Choices for the Dutch Tool Chest
If you are building a Dutch Tool Chest, you have a number of good choices when it comes to the hardware. Here is some of the hardware I’ve had success with.
Black Bear Forge. John Switzer, the blacksmith at Black Bear Forge, can provide everything you need for the chest at a reasonable price for handmade work. The strap hinges and hasp are $250 as a set. Chest lifts are $65 a pair. This is gorgeous stuff and is what I have on my personal chest.
John makes things one at a time, so be sure to give him some lead time when planning your project.
Lee Valley Tools carries a lot of hinges that work well with this project.
Unequal Strap Hinges. The two longer hinges (with the 9-1/2”-long leaf) are best for the Dutch chest. With these hinges, you screw the short leaf onto the back of the chest. Yes, it’s traditional.
Equal Strap Hinges. These are also surface-mounted on the back of the chest and the inside of the lid. No mortising is required – only a small notch in the lid to house the hinge’s barrel.
Large Strap Hinges. If security is a real concern, these hinges are a good choice. One end is mortised into the case and the strap is screwed to the lid. I don’t think these look quite as nice as any of the above options, but I’m a hardware snob.
The chest handles for this project can be difficult to source. I have some old brass ones, which are difficult to find for some reason. Lee Valley offers these nice iron ones. I also encourage you to search on eBay. I’ve had good luck there.
Van Dyke’s Restorers also carries a lot of strap hinges. Here is a good place to start. Most of the hinges that have one leaf that is a butt hinge and the second leaf is a strap will work. But check the measurements to make sure the leaves aren’t too big. Some of these hinges are for architectural woodwork.
Van Dyke’s also carries some reasonably priced hasps, including this one.
— Christopher Schwarz
Melencolia Square, Part 5: A Romanian Improvement
After you make a bunch of these 16th-century squares, two things become apparent.
1. Gee, these squares are handy, compact and easy to use when scribing lines on work that has been trued up.
2. Gee, these squares are a pain to true up because of all the end grain in the handle.
In fact, truing them up is the only difficult thing about making them. If I’m careful when I build them, then they come out of the clamps dead square and ready for a coat of finish. If they aren’t square, it usually takes me about 15 to 20 minutes of fussing around to get them square. You have to bevel off the moulding profiles on the handle with care so you don’t spelch the corners when truing things up.
The best plane for this task is a heavy jointer, which has the inertia to plow through 2” x 2” of end grain without complaining.
When truing up my fifth or sixth square, I thought about making the blade a little wider than the handle – like an 18th-century wooden try square. That would make the square a piece of cake to true up – no end grain. But none of the images in my library showed that detail.
Jeff Burks to the rescue.
One of the coolest images Jeff dug up is from a Romanian fortified church in Biertan. The pews are decorated with carved tools from the craft guild that built the church furnishings. Construction on the church began in 1468 and continued into the 16th century. Jeff and I have been discussing whether the carving of the tools is indeed from the 16th century or might be later.
In any case, the Melencolia square shown in the sculpted grouping of tools has its blade wider than the handle. Score.
If you’d like to investigate this church some more, Jeff provided these links. Here’s the set of photos where that original image came from. You can read more about Biertan here. Warning, it will make you want to visit. And so don’t read these travel blogs on Biertan here and here.
So I have one more square to make. Then I really have to stop fooling around with these squares and start building a big piece of casework on my calendar.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. I posted a couple of SketchUp drawings of these squares on my blog at Popular Woodworking Magazine. Here’s the link. Other stories in this too-long series:
- The Melencolia I Square, Part 1
- Melencolia Square, Part 2: An Angular English Friend
- Melencolia Square, Part 3: Construction
- Melencolia Square, Part 4: Look for a Sign
- The Wierix Square, or ‘Die Fledermaus’
Quick – 2 Spots Open in My Dutch Tool Chest Class
Because of some military redeployments, there are two spots open in my Dutch Tool Chest class at Roy Underhill’s The Woodwright’s School on June 18-20, 2014.
If you can skip out of work (or are lucky enough to be an “individual of leisure”), you can register for the class here. Scroll down on the page and you’ll see the class listing. Keep scrolling. Yup. Oops. Too far.
Thanks to Roy, these classes are highly amusing. Thanks to me, they are also hirsute. Megan Fitzpatrick (who is not hirsute) has threatened to be my assistant during the class. And the Pittsboro, N.C., shop is a great place to take a woodworking class.
The Dutch Tool Chest class is a great introduction to handwork – even if you’ve never picked up a tool before.
— Christopher Schwarz
